KDevelop 4 Beta 1: Developing Software for KDE

The KDevelop team released its first beta version of the development environment for KDE and Qt programs.

The final version of KDevelop 4 is still a long way off. The developers explicitly assert in their newsgroup that the software in its current state is "in no way feature complete" and that are "still bugs and missing functionality." Nevertheless, the software is stable enough to present to a wider user base from which constructive feedback is sought.

KDevelop 4 offers at the least some new help to C++ programmers. The beta automatically resolves missing include directives and writes forward-declarations for typed classes and functions. A blog from developer "zwabel" gives a practical usage example.

Aside from such small but good every day examples, KDevelop 4 includes a fully integrated CMake build system and linkage with the Subversion and git version control systems. Integration with the Qt GUI designer, with which graphical interfaces can easily be combined, is unfortunately still in a startup phase. A number of bugs were fixed since the last alpha and the user interface made a bit more attractive to new users "to lower the entrance barrier."

Source code for the beta is available at the KDE Download site. The development environment itself consists of the KDevPlatform and KDevelop packages, with the former to be installed first. Both packages require KDE 4.2.0 or later. Kubuntu users can download the single kdevelop-kde4 package from the Kubuntu Experimental Archive. Mandriva users can find the beta with the KDE 4.2 packages and openSUSE users will find it hidden in the KDE 4 Extra-Apps repository.

KDevelop 4 from KDevelop.org was completely reworked from its aging pre-version and was made compatible with Qt4.x and KDE 4. A project homepage table compares KDevelop 3 with KDevelop 4. Zwabel's weblog mentioned earlier and apaku.wordpress.com give insights into, and screenshots of, the new beta release.